By Touch
by Zayz
Summary: LJ. "He touched me once and I recoiled...he touches me now and I can't exist without it." R&R?


A/N: I know I should probably be working on other things at the moment, but of course, I never do. I'm way too sporadic for that – hence, I prefer one-shots to chaptered fics.

However, I digress.

I don't really know what triggered this little thing. I never know what triggers anything in me, because my mind is such a kooky place; so when this came to me today, I didn't even question it. I'm in a state where nothing is quite right in my world even though it should be and writing (particularly this) felt like my only therapy.

Lily's POV. Year seven. It'll make sense at the end, I promise.

Please remember to read/review – and keep your critique gently expressed.

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**By Touch  
****Zayz**

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Year One

_I walked down the corridor by myself._

_I was lost, because I didn't know the building and I didn't know anyone else to help me yet. I wasn't one of those people that just approached random strangers to ask a question – not yet, anyway._

_It was only the first week; I was young, Muggleborn, confused with this new world around me because I didn't have a place in it yet. I was never the type to talk much right away when I wasn't so…not-in-control. I'm one of those people who must know exactly what's going on before I make any kind of a move._

_However, for adapting purposes, I was thinking about asking the first not-frightening-looking person I met; when all of a sudden, this boy my age bounds up to me, bright and so effervescent I was left with the sensation of having bright light in my face after total darkness._

_He was a cheerful lad, with a strong jaw, hazel eyes, messy black hair, and a confidence I normally had but couldn't find at that convenient moment. I blinked at him and wondered at his presence. He did the same for me, but at a more accelerated pace._

"_Hey, are you lost?" he asked me._

"_No, I'm taking a short-cut to Transfiguration," I responded in what I hoped was a curt tone. The boy laughed._

"_It's okay, I got lost trying to find it too," he said. "But it's in the direction; go straight down the corridor, bang left, and it's right upstairs."_

"_Thank you," I said much too harshly, although I was grateful._

"_No problem." This boy was one of those amiable puppy types everybody loved, I could just tell. "Do you want me to show you?"_

"_No –" I began to say, but he cut me off by taking my hand and sprinted down the corridor with me bumping along, too startled to do a thing._

_When we turned the corner, though, I got a clue and wrenched my hand away as though burned, everything about my face screaming my sheer bewilderment at the situation. Never had I been manhandled like that against my will._

"_What the hell are you playing at?" I demanded._

_The boy was also surprised, but for a different reason. "Sorry," he said. "I wanted to help, that's all."_

He touched me once and I recoiled.

Year Two

_For the first time since I was six years old, I was crying._

_Normally, I wasn't a crier. I don't like crying. Crying was a sign of weakness to me and I thought I was far too strong to do it; but here I was, crying my little green eyes out, and I couldn't stop even if I tried. Which I most certainly had._

_It was the first exam of the second year, and I'd passed with very little on the final exams of first year. I thought I had learned from my mistakes and done better. Apparently, I hadn't, because when this exam came back to me, the bold failure mark was across the top of the parchment with dark, incriminating ink._

_I couldn't believe it._

_I was certainly not the only one to have failed the exam, as seen by the tears around me, but they didn't know how hard that first year had been for me. My friends succeeded and did their best to keep me along – especially Alice and Marlene – but I hadn't been able to grasp the concepts hammered into me._

_I was Muggleborn and nobody thought I could do magic anyway. This failure only proved them right and I didn't want to fail. Who did?_

_So I cried, cried, cried, and the tears wouldn't stop. What would my parents say? How would I survive the rest of the year? I wanted to be a witch. I could be a witch. So why wasn't I doing the things that the other witches did with so much ease, so much grace? Perhaps I wasn't meant for this new world I loved so much. Things would get easier, but I didn't know that, or perhaps didn't want to, when I was so deep within my misery._

_That was when that boy Potter who does well on _everything _called out to me from his seat, his black hair as messy as it had been the first day I laid eyes on him last year, and he asked me, "Oi, Evans, are you okay?"_

_It wasn't up to this Pureblood sod who knew what he was doing to keep in touch with my trifling miseries. I was low enough; I wanted to recuperate from this disaster with my friends, not tricking Potter who never had his tie straight._

"_Shove off," I called back to him._

_The boy grinned. His friends – three of them – grinned with him. Potter immediately walked towards me, his face a strange and puzzling mix of sincerity and humor. I didn't understand what he was doing, talking to me when his girlfriend was a few seats away from me and clearly looking at him in a way that requested his attention. What a cheater._

_I decided to let him come relatively close to me though, close enough for his surprisingly big hands to brush by my shoulder, but that's when I struck._

_Up I got, and in an instant, my foot had slammed down atop his, invoking a noise of astonishment from him and a few choice curses from me._

_The class was rather surprised too, to be frank. Evans, the red-head trying to pass her classes, taking on Potter, the queerly intelligent braggart who was the first to get a girlfriend. They hadn't seen it coming._

_But it felt good, watching him go off with at least a slightly tarnished ego back to his friends, the blood in my ears and my heart beating swiftly, the memory of his touch with my reaction still replaying triumphantly in my mind's eye._

He touched me twice and I reacted.

Year Three

_He was at it again and I was seriously getting really, really sick of it._

_I had no idea who Potter thought he was, but clearly, his self-perception was more than distorted. He seemed to think he was some kind of sex-pot or something, the way he flashed his newly muscled arms at girls, rumpled up his pig-sty hair, dated my best friend Marlene._

_The fact that he had "ostentatious" built into his system since birth, as well as his status as World's Best Chaser on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, didn't help a thing. Girls simply adored his irritating smirk, swooned at his every word, and generally made me sick to my stomach no matter what I ate that day._

_Worse still, his overly-inflated head seemed to impel him to gain even _more _status in the feminine world by making the first move and flirting with any girl stupid enough to look his way._

_And even though I didn't, he appeared to think I was the stupidest one of all; because he'd been stuck to me like gravy on mashed potatoes all year._

_What did he think I'd do, come and join the cattle herds praising him and prostrating before his cockiness?_

_It was more than ridiculous; so that day, when he came up to me, his smile in place and his audience amused, I didn't want to take it._

_The moment he said, "Oi, Evans, want to go out?" and tried to grab my hand, I spat at him, "No," and drove my knee between his legs._

_He crumpled with pain, allowing me to make my getaway to giggling Alice and guffawing Marlene, but he still gave me the strangest look before coming forward to harass me once again:_

_It was like he was actually sad for a moment, sad that I was more than willing to hurt him when he tried to get closer, sad that I could never look at him with the positivism of the rest of our house, sad that I refused to give him another chance after he wasted his first million of them._

_I tried to analyze what was going on in those pools of lively hazel, but the moment passed too quickly for me to do much; he straightened up, his mouth opened, mine did too, and life resumed, full speed ahead._

_No random pithiness to be seen in him again._

He touched me thrice and I attacked.

Year Four

_I never really got through a day without yelling at him, it seemed._

_Every time he got near me, every time he tried to talk to him, every time he asked me out and I said no, something would spark in me, an on-the-surface fire blazing right back up to life, and we would burst._

_Sometimes it was him, sometimes it was me. Sometimes we got through a few instances where we just walked away, but those were getting rarer and rarer as the year passed on._

_Alice kept saying it was part of being a teenager, with the whole overreacting thing, but I didn't believe her. Not then._

_According to me, the blame laid solely with Potter._

_And, according to me, I was completely and utterly right about it._

_I came out of my shell a lot, when I rowed with Potter. It was so peculiar; I'd be sitting there in the common room, talking and laughing and being rational in a teenage-girl kind of way with my friends, and then Potter would come and I would change to something cruder, something less refined._

_I didn't care who was watching me when I raged at him. I didn't care if people thought me unstable, deranged, ridiculous. I only trusted the shivers down my spine, the violent palpitations of my heart, the tiny, fine hairs on the back of my neck when he looked me in the eyes. The only way to go was ahead, practicing a wide range of insults and hexes on him because I could and he was there and he was _so annoying _I couldn't even say._

_It didn't matter to me what he said or what he did once I got my point across. Even if that tiny glimmer of pithiness I could only rarely glimpse came out at some cruel thing I said, that was my reward, my victory._

_He needed to be taken down a few pegs and I had finally done the job. Stupid arrogant berk. He deserved it._

_He didn't even need to be physically around to affect me anymore, even. He could be sitting all the way over there, on the other side of the room, and I'd feel the flames licking my body with dark, tantalizing seduction:_

_I was touched and scorched by his mere presence in my brain; so when he spoke directly to me, or our hands brushed and created alarming electricity together, that was all I needed to be my alternate and volatile personality, bringing us both down into some sort of oblivion together._

He touched me four times and I shoved him away.

Year Five

_This was the time when he and I were at our peak, our zone, when it came to the other._

_He knew me so well, and even though he meant less to me than a scrap of dung, I knew him too. I knew him in ways nobody else did._

_I knew what made him angry enough to spit fire at me. I knew what upset him more than anything else in the world. I knew the style with which he moved and I knew the passion with which he lived._

_I knew that he loved me, and that completed the hostile intimacy we had established._

_Some people said he only fancied me, but there were exceptional moments when I questioned if he loved me. I hated the idea of him loving me, but I wanted to know how he felt about me, and with his insistent proposals to take me out, the question of love did arise._

_And with it arose the separate but somewhat related question of what love really was to him – and to me._

_I spent a long time pondering, but I kept running into the worst possible conclusions. My friends insisted that I loved him and he loved me, love being the operator in both theories, but I didn't think that was the case – nor could I give a rationale for it. The situation made my head spin._

_Was love the need for him to be part of my life each day, whether for better or for worse?_

_Was it the way he made my body go mad, going too fast in the case of my heart or far too slow in the case of my brain?_

_Was it the way he made me think like no one else could make me, feel the way nobody else could invoke in me, become the way no one else could get me?_

_What was hate? What was love?_

_Why was I thinking like this at the delicate, hormonal age of fifteen – and when was the right time to consider it?_

_It made my head pound with a dull ache because it was all one hideous contradiction without a definitive answer, just many, many paths leading up to nowhere. I didn't know right from left, virtue from corruption, and I wondered if this was what emotion was supposed to do for people._

_Was I living because I thought, or was I sinking under too many complications?_

_I didn't know. I didn't think I would ever know. And then came that day that tipped the scale and sent me flying across the sky, away from everything I knew and into the realms of everything else:_

_The day after another one of our explosions at the end of our exams in the beginning of summer, I took a walk around the lake because the day was bright and I needed some air. I stole out while the rest of the school was supposed to be at lunch, something I did a few times a year, and I settled myself down, enjoying the simplicity of being outside when nobody else was._

_Then I stumbled upon the strangest sight in the world: James Potter, sitting by the beech tree where we had faced off yesterday, his head against the tree trunk and his eyes out towards the sky._

_The image was disturbing mainly because James Potter was not one of those people who sat still and thought. That action was more associated with people like me, people who liked to weigh their options instead of being impulsive and irrational and completely unique for it._

_But there he was, staring out around him, his hazel eyes in line with the clouds of serene cotton above us all, his hair ruffled by the wind this time, rather than his fingers._

_It was a straightforward picture, but it touched me irreversibly, showed me there was more to this supposed-to-be-simple vendetta I carried against James Potter for being too vibrant._

_I was at a crossroads, a fork in the road, and with the seemingly endless summer sun bringing about rays of enlightenment, I honestly had no idea how the rest of my life was going to go._

He touched me five times and I saw.

Year Six

_This time was quiet, quieter than I was used to. Everything became different now._

_People were changing – adults were growing out of the children we'd always known and loved, landing on all sorts of places on the spectrum of decency. The things that had been black-and-white for the time we'd been in the castle were slowly mellowing out to shades of gray. More people than just me felt lost among the din of voices struggling to be heard._

_James was one of those people who changed the most. Over the course of the year, he appeared to be unable to decide whether or not he wanted to be the vivacious kid he was at age eleven or be the mature adult people (sometimes I) expected him to be._

_Sometimes, I could see the old zeal shining through hazel that had never had so many shadows in it; other times, he was only hazel without anything extra._

_And it was the scariest thing I'd ever seen._

_James had been one of those people who stayed true to himself no matter how many people tried to wear him down. But after fifth year and all we'd shared, he withdrew significantly and his personality undulated, making worrying tremors and making all of us worried._

_His Marauder friends were beginning to fall apart, grasping for something but not finding much of anything. James wasn't steady and same like he used to be. The gaping hole that came from the absence of his stupidity became too apparent as everybody grew up way too fast._

_There were times when I knew, knew with a conviction deep inside my bones, that he was a man too far gone from his past to ever qualify to be 'James Potter.' I could look at him and think, "This is a changed man" but not feel any comfort from it, even though that's what I'd wanted since the day I met him._

_He was flat, butterbeer without fizzy bubbles, and how could James Potter, _James Potter_, ever be flat?_

_But then there were other times, other times when there was something there I hadn't seen before, glimmering like the last tiny flame in a sea of burnt-out ashes:_

_When our hands brushed by each other and I felt something foreign in me, half-familiar like an early childhood memory or a song long forgotten, trigger once again; even when I gave him the quill he dropped, and he thanked me, and left through the door to Sirius Black, leaving me dazed in his wake._

He touched me six times and I wondered.

Year Seven

_Being Heads together started off odd, but it isn't now._

_Now, everything is under control._

_It began with ungainliness, the shock of having to spend so much time with a person so conflicted in himself and in one's self. It began with embarrassment, not knowing whether to hold the door open for him when he came in after me, not knowing if it was appropriate to say good-night before bed._

_Then slowly, gradually, all of it regulated on its own._

_I got the feeling, throughout that regulation I can't explain, that I was only a fallen leaf being carried home by a stream that knew better than me. I'd let him into me, get to know me, and I reached another crossroads, a fork in the road, to the path I'd taken in fifth year when I thought I knew everything._

_I remembered all my old questions, what love was what hate was, and with the help of Alice and Marlene, and with the help of James's patience, I allowed myself to breathe and answer myself honestly._

_I discovered through this time that love and hate are much the same in practice, but worlds apart in principle._

_Hate involves bringing someone down, while love…love involves bringing both parties high, flying, soaring together like birds with invincible wings._

_I never really hated him, because even though I tried to bring him down, I only tried to bring him down to see me at eye-level, hazel to green, boy to girl, human to human, soul to soul._

_I tried to make him see me for what I was on the ground, rather than the pedestal he attempted to lift me to; and now I think he does._

_It took me the longest time to figure out where we stood, but once I did, once I let my guard down and admitted to him during our patrol, spontaneously but truly, that I cared about him for reasons I would never understand…that's when it happened._

_That's when I knew where we started and where we are now, hindsight in perfect twenty-twenty vision. I looked at him with eyes crystal-clear, and I saw in him pithiness, and the strangest presence of myself, a person just trying to figure out where to fit in this world I live in._

_All he wanted was something solid. All I wanted was to figure us out. Maybe both of our goals could meld into one, could meld into something spectacular because we'll find our way._

_But the only means to discover was to try – and as cautious as we were, old people holding hands and crossing the busy street, we did._

_He wasted no time that night in pressing me against a wall with all his weight sinking into me, our mouths meeting in the most eloquent silences, speaking everything we could never say. He explored the mouth that could never tell him anything he wanted to hear, and even though we remained ungainly, embarrassed, confused, we were too closely bound to the other to care._

_It was just like before, but with principles rearranged._

_Desire, need, passion, everything – it was all there, given a new sheen, a new boldness, that somehow made us extraordinary now instead of before._

_He makes me every color of the rainbow, and I'm finally okay with the fact that I do the same to him, to James, that annoying Pureblood who always seemed to know what to do when I didn't._

_He celebrated us in the depths of winter and he's teaching me each day to do the same._

_And here we are:_

_Deranged but together, our lives rippled, because we were finally touched by and with the other; bread on cheese, smile on child, sun sweetly kissing the horizon line._

He touches me now and I can't exist without it.


End file.
